When digital content, such as digital text, a digital image, and/or a digital video, is shared between two parties, or is otherwise accessible from an electronic device, the security and privacy of the content can be compromised in various ways. For example, the content may be accessed by an unintended recipient and/or an adversarial recipient. Additionally or alternatively, transmission of the content may be intercepted, or a breach of trust may occur with an intended recipient or with a hosted server. Moreover, a breach of security may occur with a hosted server or a displaying device.
Various electronic applications have attempted to increase the privacy of mildly-sensitive digital content and casual digital content (e.g., content that does not require a permanent record) by using ephemeral messages that are deleted in one form after a short period of time. Examples of ephemeral messaging include Snapchat, Inc.'s Snapchat application, Facebook, Inc.'s MessageMe and Poke applications, and Kismet's Blink application. Such applications may merely provide a cosmetic solution to privacy concerns, however, as it is possible to capture a permanent record of digital content by taking a screenshot of the content, and as it may be difficult to ensure permanent deletion of the content from an application server. For example, digital images may never be completely deleted from some ephemeral messaging servers.
Moreover, although Bump Technologies, Inc.'s Bump application may be used to enable proximity-based mobile-to-mobile connections, the Bump application may rely on a client-server model and may require recording of geo-location data to instantiate the connections. Such use of a client-server model, as well the recording of geo-location data, may reduce communications security and privacy.
One example of a secure messaging application is BlackBerry's BlackBerry Messenger (BBM). Although BBM is not an ephemeral solution, and although BBM has a strong legacy of messaging security within government and enterprise environments, BBM may have vulnerabilities with respect to unintended recipients, adversarial recipients, and breaches of trust with intended recipients.